His mouth was so dry he couldn’t speak, could only nod to let her know he had heard.
They got out of the plane, moving with exaggerated care, as if the return to terra firma was still a tentative thing.
A loud squawking caw came from the top of a nearby spruce tree, and Liam squinted up to see the raven sitting in its very top. It squawked again and launched suddenly, sailing over their heads on shiny black wings. It swooped and dived, climbed and banked, did snap rolls and Immelmanns in an aerial exhibition of consummate grace and power that mocked the rigid form of their own craft.
Liam watched with a kind of numb incomprehension, Wy with envy. “God, to fly like that,” she said. “It’s all we want when we take to the air, to master it, to make it our own. And we never even come close.”
She looked at Liam, still mute. She looked at the Cessna, planted placidly on its gear. “We were never in that much danger, Liam,” she said gently. “Yeah, the throttle cable broke, but there’s a way to handle it. There’s a way to handle pretty much everything in the air, as long as you don’t get excited. Bob DeCreft used to say, no matter what happens, don’t panic, just fly the airplane.” She took another deep, careful breath. “He was a good teacher, old Bob.”
Finally Liam found his voice. “Yeah. He sure was. Wy?”
“What?”
“I love you.”
It was her turn to look shaken.
“I love you, Wy,” he said again.
“Liam,” she said with obvious difficulty, “we have to talk.”
Newenham, September 3
Diana Prince had never wanted to be anything but what she was: an Alaska state trooper. Her great-grandfather had been with the New York City police, her grandfather had worked for J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and both parents were thirty-year detectives with the Anchorage Police Department who shared three citations for valor. Her brother and only sibling had disgraced the family twice over, first by becoming an attorney and second by going to work for the ACLU, so upon Diana’s shoulders rested the honor of the present generation of Princes, and her parents and grandparents had made sure she knew it.
Her father, a gruff man with eyes that could bore holes right through you, had sat her down at the kitchen table her senior year in high school and had interrogated her as to her reasons for becoming a trooper. “It’s in the blood,” she’d said, but he hadn’t let her get away with that. It might have been partly family tradition, but it was also the reading ofThe Klondike Rush, which in part recounted the activities of Samuel Benton Steele, the Canadian Mountie whose forces had kept the peace during the Klondike Gold Rush.
Her father looked at her mother and said, “So. It’s the hat,” referring to the round-crowned, flat-brimmed hat that made all state troopers look like Dudley Do-Right.
Well, maybe it was, again only partly, but it was mostly because Diana had a strong sense of right and wrong, an even stronger sense of duty, and a liking for authority. She stumbled her way to an explanation of these feelings which omitted her main reason, which was that she had no wish to stand in her parents’ shadows, cast long in the Anchorage P.D., and which must have satisfied her parents because her father then pointed out all the disadvantages that came with the job-the horrible hours, the daily stress of dealing with the lowest level of the gene pool, the alienation from the general population, the ever-present risk of injury, even death-and he had asked, no, he had demanded that she think it over before she made her final decision. This included, he decreed, four years at college, for which he and her mother would pay so long as she pulled down grades of B or better and elected a discipline that would be useful for promotion. “It’s better to be boss,” he said. “A degree will get you there.”
She came home from the University of Washington with a B.A. in criminal justice, and filled out her application for the trooper academy the next day.
The academy was notoriously picky in its selection of recruits, thanks to the state’s munificent endowment of troopers’ salaries, but they took one look at Diana’s sex, citizenship and degree and snapped her up. She graduated at the top of her class, and at the graduation ceremony recited the short, simple oath of the Alaska State Troopers with the absolute conviction that she was going to be the best trooper who ever was, with the highest conviction rate and the lowest percentage of citizen complaints in the history of the service. She would serve, she would protect, and before long, she knew in her secret heart, she would be running the joint.
Her first assignment after her probationary period had been Newenham, where she’d arrived a little over two months before. Newenham, in spite of it being a seven-step pay increase because of its Bush location, was not first pick on anyone’s list. The sergeant in charge before Corporal Campbell had been that unusual individual, a careless trooper: careless of the law, careless of the safety and security of his community and, most unforgivably, careless of the reputation of the service. He had been loathed from Togiak to Igiugik, he had been despised by fellow and superior officers alike, and if he hadn’t been a former governor’s brother-in-law, he would never have lasted as long as he did. As it was, he’d only been transferred, taking his problems with him to Eagle River, where at least he would be answerable to an on-the-scene authority other than himself, and where everyone prayed he wouldn’t screw up for the next year, after which he became eligible for retirement.
Into this mess stepped Liam Campbell, recently broken in rank and transferred in disgrace because of an error in judgment that had left five people dead in Denali Park. The way Prince heard it, it hadn’t been Campbell’s fault, but he’d been the sergeant in charge of the post and the buck stopped on his desk. Up to then, his record had been exemplary. He’d been John Dillinger Barton’s golden boy, and the smart money had him moving up the chain of command high and fast.
Instead, he got Newenham, a fishing community of two thousand at the end of an hour’s ride by 737, on the edge of Bristol Bay, which had once seen the largest runs of salmon in the world, where fortunes had been made in the set of one net. Now, the salmon were returning in ever-dwindling numbers, incomes were falling, and alcohol consumption was on the rise. There were foreign vessels docking now and then for supplies, there was tension between the white and Native communities, there was tension between all Alaskans and the state and federal governments. It was a community ripe with possibilities. Diana had taken a long, hard look at Liam’s record, made a few discreet inquiries and had liked what she had learned. She sensed an opportunity to pile up numbers in the “Cases Closed” column and expressed a preference for a duty assignment in Newenham, knowing full well she would get it by default.
When she and Liam were done with it, Newenham would be first on everybody’s list.
All of which explained why she was on the phone to the Crime Lab in Anchorage that day three times before noon. Tired of talking to her, the receptionist finally gave her the direct line to the ballistics lab. An anonymous tech was brusque and uncommunicative. She called again in an hour and he hung up on her.
She called the medical examiner, one Dr. Hans Brilleaux, known less than affectionately to the law enforcement community as Brillo, for his Brillo-pad hair, a black, wiry nest that looked like it could provide houseroom for a flock of swallows. It smelled like it, too.
Brillo was less than enthusiastic. “I’ve got four stiffs ahead of yours,” he said in answer to her query, and then he hung up on her, which seemed to be the day’s universal response.
She drummed her fingers impatiently on the desk. Until the autopsy came in, she would have nothing comparing the pattern of buckshot to the patterns Teddy and John’s shotguns had presumably produced for the Crime Lab, so she went down to Bill’s for a fat pill. Dottie and Paul Takak were dispensing comfort in the form of bacon cheeseburgers and fountain Cokes. Dottie, a Yupik elder and a pillar of the local Native community, sat in back of the bar, arms folded, and refused to serve any Yupik customers alcohol. In the kitchen, Paul put ketchup on every burger, whether you wanted it or not. Sighing inwardly, Diana opened up her burger to scrape the layer of red sauce away. Life in Newenham went to hell with Bill and Moses both gone.